William Penn Lecture
1956
The Joy That Is Set Before Us
Delivered at
Arch Street Meeting House
Philadelphia
by
Elise Boulding
Joy is a frighteningly difficult subject to speak
about, and I did not choose it willingly. It came, and would not
be put aside. Christian joy is usually considered the
province of saints and mystics. In our world the average
Christian contents himself with a more temporal happiness. For
the real difference between happiness and joy is that one
is grounded in this world, the other in eternity.
Happiness cannot encompass suffering and evil. Joy can.
Happiness depends on the present. Joy leaps into the future
and triumphantly creates a new present out of it. It is a fruit
of the spirit, a gift of God no man can own it. His Kingdom
is Joy, said Paul. Joy is the ultimate liberation of the
human spirit. It enables man to travel to the very gates of
heaven and to the depths of hell, and never cease rejoicing.
Jesus probably never knew happiness, for the shadows lay
upon him early, but he knew the joy of the Lord. "For the joy
that was set before him, (he) endured the cross, despising
the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne
of God." Part of the very essence of joy is a vision of the
Kingdom of God, which is, was, and ever shall be. The temporal
fruit of this joy is the leap into the future, to wrest this
vision from its position on the horizon and pull it into the
present, to make it a reality for this world. This is exactly what
Jesus did, but people were afraid, and quickly pushed the
vision back to the horizon. We have kept it safely chained
there ever since, but the memory of what Jesus did, and
the knowledge that it could happen again, has ennobled
all mankind.
There have been men who have succeeded in
breaking the chains and snatching the vision back into the
present for a brief moment. St. Francis, the little minstrel of
God, the most joyous saint of them all, was one of these.
Here was a man so full of the joy of God that he was
constantly bursting into song wherever he went. He took his joy
with him into the darkest places he could find, in a century
that was very dark indeed, so that lepers and outcasts saw
the Kingdom in all its glory. Sister Pain cast no shadows
on that joy, and his last hymn of praise was to Sister Death.
Where in the world today do we see such joy, or
even faint reflections of the joy such as lesser men than St.
Francis might experience? I think the reason this topic has
forced itself upon me with such urgency is that I feel so keenly
the absence of joy in our day, not only among the
"world's people," but among Christians as well Quakers
not excepted. That large parts of the world are blanketed
in suffering and fear is nothing new in history. Suffering
is not in itself the enemy, but rather the condition
of joy. The suffering that is a condition of joy is not, of course,
the sophisticated self-torture of an excessively introverted
spirit, but participation in what Tom Kelly called "the
inexorable residue" of the world's suffering, "awful, unremovable in
a lifetime, withering all souls not genuinely rooted in
Eternity itself."
What is new in our century is that for the first time
in history the way is open, from a strictly scientific point
of view, to end those sufferings of man due to want and
illness. Standing within sight of what ought to be a golden
age, people are finally realizing that there is indeed an
inexorable residue of suffering, and that it stems from man's
spiritual incapacities, not his physical ones. For two hundred
years and more man has been cherishing a growing
conviction that he could make a paradise of earth with his own
hands, on the basis of his own knowledge and achievements.
Now he is finding that he has been building upon the sands,
and the foundations of his paradise have given way. But
instead of hunting around for a solid rock in order to start
building anew and better, he has thrown up his hands and cried
out that paradise is after all not possible. The best that can
be done is a series of jerry-built houses on the shifting
sands of human whims a new one after every storm.
This is why joy eludes our generation. In the midst
of suffering, we have lost the knowledge of eternity and
the vision of paradise. A people with a certain conviction
of eternity do not take refuge in the barren corridors
of existentialism and cling desperately to the fleeting
moment. A people with a vision in which they believe cannot be
so easily satisfied with a television set which provides all of
life at second hand, including religion. For centuries
mankind has dreamed of and worked for a better tomorrow, and
now all dreaming has suddenly stopped. Man has come to a
halt, terrified, at the edge of an abyss. What does he see when
he looks over the edge? He sees Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World, or George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four,
or any one of the hundreds of grim pictures of tomorrow painted by
the growing band of science-fiction writers who have
become almost alarmingly productive in the last two decades.
You don't read science fiction? Perhaps not. But a strikingly
high percentage of college-trained men and women in their
middle thirties who are engaged in scientific or other
professional work do. Furthermore, most of the people who write
these books are no literary hacks who live by filling the pages
of pulp magazines with cheap sensationalism. They
are physicists, philosophers, political scientists, medical men
the same kind of thoughtful, intelligent, well-trained
people as their readers. (Incidentally, they dislike as much as
you or I the lurid covers to which pocket editions of
science-fiction books are invariably treated.) They take a high
view of their calling as science-fiction writers. Recognizing
the dangers of trial-and-error methods in dealing with
the powerful sources of destruction now available to man,
they feel they are "practising out in the no-practise area" as
one writer puts it. In other words, they are trying out
possible futures for mankind on paper.
The visions of the future painted by these
serious-minded writers are not to be ignored. I have had occasion
to examine some of them in recent months, and it is a
grim business. Many of them are set out in space, and
tremendous galactic empires are described. In the process, every sin
of our poor little earth is writ large all over the universe.
I think I can bear with the earth as it is, but a whole
universe of earths, with nothing better anywhere, is almost too
much, both for my imagination and my faith! Sometimes the
grosser evils of physical want have been overcome, as in
Brave New World, only to face man with spiritual evils of
overwhelming dimensions. If the story is confined to earth, it
quite frequently begins with a few ragged and hardy
individuals starting life over again after a world cataclysm.
What optimism there is, consists chiefly in giving man a
chance to rise to his former heights before the next cataclysm,
so that his story may be repeated indefinitely. Many of
these stories are haunted by a growing fear of
radiation-induced abnormalities, and outline possibilities for future
human relationships that make plain old-fashioned race
prejudice seem innocent indeed by comparison. An
editorial introduction to one of these stories praises it for its
"grimly determined optimism and bitter faith." This, I fear,
describes a high-point in optimism which few of these novels
reach. Occasionally a mystical note is introduced, and an evil
world goes up in smoke that the Creator may create a new
and perfect one. It is a far cry from the Christian struggle
for perfection, however.
Why do I dwell on these dark visions? Because
they have a far greater significance than I would willingly
ascribe to them. For the past year I have been engaged in
translating a book by the Dutch sociologist, Dr. Fred Polak, on the
image of the future. His thesis is that the visions of the
future which a society holds provide the dynamic power for
moving that society toward the fulfillment of these visions.
Societies tend to become that which they really
aspire to and something more is meant here than mere
lip-service idealism. His book is partly a study of the visions of
cultures of the past and how they have operated to change
those cultures, and partly an analysis of the visions of
modern western society. The western world, as he points out, is
a product of the Judaic-Christian vision, and many
great things have come of this vision. But it is no longer true
to say that this is the vision which is uppermost in the
minds and hearts of the average man and woman of the West. It
is perhaps least of all true in America, and this in spite of
the fact that there is a much higher percentage of
church-goers among the population than ever before. The practical
(and not-to-be despised) benefits of church membership
in providing a community of social identification and a
sense of belonging are, I fear, a far cry from the response of
the early Christians to the call to enter into the Kingdom. If it
is true that we do move in the direction of our visions, then
it behooves us to examine our visions.
Once people felt secure in the midst of earthly
insecurity because they knew of another Kingdom, existing since
the beginning of time and which would one day rule
on earth too. Now they stand on the edge of the abyss and see
nothing but horror before them. Can we blame them for
shutting their eyes to the future entirely and clinging desperately
to the present? They live from day to day, from paycheck
to paycheck, from mortgage payment to mortgage
payment. They have children, but out of fear, not out of faith.
They send them away from home as quickly as possible to
school, to church, to the Scouts anywhere in the hopes
that someone else can teach these children the magic
wisdom that will avert the impending catastrophe that has
frozen the parents to impotence. I have heard many well
educated middle-class mothers of young children confess that
they feel they have nothing to "give" their children no faith,
no wisdom for living. It is not lack of a sense of
responsibility that prompts these mothers to encourage their
youngsters to enter a plethora of outside activities under someone
else's supervision, but a painful sense of inadequacy. It is no
longer true that he who has children has a vision of the future.
The parents who feel they have nothing to give
their children are the products of several generations of
idealistic and well-meaning Americans who brought up
their children on democracy as a religion, with the pursuit of
happiness (for all) as its ultimate goal. There was a very brief period
in human history the nineteenth century, to be exact
when democracy could pass for an adequate religion. We
were still moving forward on the impetus provided by the
visions of early settlers like Roger Williams and William Penn.
People genuinely believed that the form and philosophy
of democracy embodied everything that was in the
religion these men had, and more. Some people still believe
this, and something very like it was taught in many high
schools when I was in my teens. The repeated waves of
immigrants who came to America seeking relief from want and
oppression have contributed to surrounding democracy with the
aura of religion. As the child of an immigrant family myself,
I very early caught a feeling of reverence for America as
The Promised Land which it might be hard for the
American-born person to duplicate. But while democracy at its
best may well be a blueprint for utopia, this generation is
finding to its cost that religion is something more than a blueprint.
In their fear and insecurity people are flocking
to churches as never before. In a recent public opinion
survey, 95 per cent of the American people identified themselves
as either Catholic, Protestant or Jewish, and only five per
cent said they had no religious preference. We have grown
so accustomed to thinking of Americans as a highly
secular people that this figure comes as something of a shock.
But before shock turns to elation it is wise to examine
the meaning of this religious identification in the lives of
the people who claim it. Will Herberg, religious leader,
social philosopher and social scientist, has done just this in
his recent book entitled Protestant-Catholic-Jew
and his careful inspection of the nature of America's religiosity
confirms, alas, our impressions regarding the basic secularism
of Americans. In 1953, nearly 10 million volumes of the
bible were distributed in the United States, but 53 per cent of
the people asked to name the first four books of the
New Testament in a public opinion poll could not even
name one! When thirty outstanding Americans were asked to
name in the order of their importance the hundred most
significant events in history, Columbus' discovery of America came
first and the birth and crucifixion of Christ came
fourteenth! When asked whether they believe in God, 95 per cent
or more of the sample population queried replied that they
did, but when asked whether their religious beliefs had any
effect on their ideas of politics or business, 54 per cent said no!
I do not have any particular reverence for public
opinion polls as the best way to discover a man's deepest
beliefs, but these figures serve to point up in a dramatic way
what has also been uncovered by much more careful study
that the churches of America are hardly auxiliaries of
the Kingdom of Heaven. In this trek to the churches, it is
not the people who have been transformed, but the
churches; they are the settlement houses of the poor, the
community centers of the middle class, and the family showpieces
of the rich. This is perhaps both cruel and unfair to say,
for there is a genuine faith in the hearts of many men
and women. But it is a blind and groping faith, for very
few people know what they believe in. Where the vision of
the Kingdom ought to be, there is mist and shadows, with
soft music in the background.
The soft whispers of an uncertain church can do
little to dispel the nightmare picture of the future which
scientists are conjuring up. Let down in his hour of need by
both democracy and the church, what is the conscientious
man of good will to do? He is increasingly taking refuge in a
kind of last-ditch individualism. The line of thought runs
thus: "I don't understand what is happening in the world,
and there is nothing I can do about it anyway. But I can't
help feeling, deep down, that there is something good in
man, and maybe we can somehow ride this storm out. I'll
just hang on as best I can, take care of my family, help
others when I can, and make the best of each day as it comes.
Let tomorrow take care of itself."
Now mind you, this is very far from being the
worst that a man could do in these times. This is a basically
healthy reaction for one who feels hopelessly lost in a situation,
and I have the more hope for our civilization just because
this kind of last-ditch individualism exists. There is certainly
no virtue in a preoccupation with the future as such. You
may remember what C. S. Lewis' Screwtape writes to his
nephew devil, just out of Tempter's College and working on his
first case: "We want a man hag-ridden by the Future
haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth
ready to break the Enemy's commands in the present if by
so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert
the other dependent for his faith on the success of failure
of schemes whose end he will not live to see. We want a
whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end,
never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as
mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real
gift which is offered them in the Present."
As a matter of fact, distinctions between present
and future are relatively unimportant for the truly
religious person, because he lives in the Eternal Now, and
his awareness encompasses equally yesterday and
tomorrow. But to the extent that we are men we are also time
bound and imperfect, and we have a responsibility laid upon us
by God himself, for the time-bound and imperfect world
we live in. We must have something to grow towards, and
our vision of the future provides the direction of growth.
Our last-ditch individualist may survive for a long time, but
he will only survive and nothing more until he gets his
bearings, brings a vision into focus, and moves in its direction.
Survival is a contentless phenomenon, and I think none of us
are interested in mere survival, either for ourselves, for
our society, or for the world.
We have been assuming that the man who stands terrified at the edge of the abyss is either a humanist or
a very secular member of the church community. What of
the man who is religious in a more orthodox sense? What of
the Christian who can not only name the first four gospels
but quote from them and who feels that he knows what
he believes in? What does he see? Does he stand rooted
in eternity, and see a vision of the Kingdom of God? We
are not, let it be said immediately, without prophets and
religious visionaries (in the best sense of the word) in our time.
But what of the larger body of dedicated Christians? What
of our religious community of Quakerdom? Eternity is
receding from us. For many deeply devout and sincere
Christians, the living core of their religion is located well in the past.
It centers about a son of God who lived, died on the cross
and was resurrected nearly two thousand years ago. Outside
of a few pentecostal and adventist sects who expend nearly
all of their precious vision in loud hosannas, no one is
looking for a Second Coming today, and no one expects any
miracles or resurrection to take place now. Our religious language
is rich in images which convey the idea that Christ is in
every man, that every mother is a Mary, that every birth of a
child is a repetition of the miracle of the birth of Christ, that
out of every death springs some kind of new life. The living
truth which gives rise to these images is a profound and
moving one, but the images themselves often degenerate into
mere figures of speech and platitudes. The sense of
expectancy, that something is going to happen, is
gone. The human mind, with its peculiar capacity for paradox, has on the one
hand pushed Jesus into the remote historical past and on
the other hand drawn him into the kitchen and made of him
a cozy every-day figure of speech. Both phenomena
have contributed equally to dissipating the sense of
imminence which his own message originally aroused.
As Jesus has faded into history and become a figure
of speech, so has his Heavenly Father. In fact, where God
is concerned even the familiar figures of speech
are disappearing in some quarters, and people who
are embarrassed to refer to Him as if He were a person
confine themselves to more comfortably vague and remote
terms (which are still figures of speech, mind you) like
"divine power" or "spiritual force." Obviously man has
been compelled into figures of speech in describing the
Creator, not only because of the limitations of language in
expressing the inexpressible, but because of the limitations of man
in conceiving the inconceivable. Our only safety lies
in remembering these limitations of the human mind, for
we are in danger of finding ourselves worshipping a figure
of speech. Ultimately, there is little difference
between worshipping a figure of speech and worshipping a
graven image. By allowing the symbol to replace the reality in
our religious experience we have lost touch with the reality
and thus with the eternity in which it is embedded. As a result
it has become possible for us to pray with great
conscious sincerity that God may remake and remold us, for we
know all the while deep in a corner of our minds that is quite
safe to pray nothing can really happen to change us. It is
this "knowledge" that we are after all safe from the possibility
of a Living Presence that effectively cuts us off from
Eternity and chains us to the present. Living in eternity means
that anything is possible, now.
If eternity is receding from us, what is happening
to the Kingdom of God? A great deal has happened to it
since the prophets first preached the coming of the Kingdom
to Israel. We have been called, and rightly so, to live as if
the Kingdom were already here. We have also been told that
the Kingdom of Heaven is within us. Again the symbol,
intended to call us to righteous living now
instead of waiting for a miraculous End of Time, has obscured the reality of
the concept of the Kingdom. While it is true that in every
age there have been Christians who have succeeded
most gloriously in living in the Kingdom here and now, many
of us use this admonition as an excuse to escape into our
own private spiritual world. I fear that it enables us to evade
our responsibility to our fellow-man who is still standing
outside the gate. If the call to live in the Kingdom means
anything, it surely means helping by our lives to create the
conditions for the Kingdom to come to all the world. It is not meant
to be a restricted club, for use by members only. Cozily
locating it inside us may give us a warm and pleasant feeling
during Meeting for Worship, but it does not serve the Kingdom.
There was no question concerning its nature in
the minds of the prophets who first proclaimed its
coming. Because so many of us have traveled so far from this
original conception in our own minds, I would like to spend a
little time reminding us of it. I quote from the chapter on
Israel in the translation now in process of Dr. Polak's
Image of the Future.
"The crucial point to keep in mind concerning the
Jews is that they expected their paradise on earth.
The Kingdom which Jehovah was to establish for His people had the
same material reality as the Promised Land. It could
be geographically located and described; it flowed with
milk and honey
This is the land where `The wolf also
shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with
the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling
together; and a little child shall lead them.' (Is. 11:6)."
"Above all, there is no mention of a heaven or
a hereafter. Salvation is a tangible thing, and it will
touch and transform that which can be seen with the eye.
Every living creature, every tree and flower, every rock, river
and mountain will glow with this salvation. When this
time comes, those who have hungered and thirsted will be
fed, both in body and in spirit
`and their souls shall be as
a watered garden; and they shall not sorrow any more at
all.' (Jer. 31:12)."
Most Christians who read their bible at all read
and love Isaiah. We tend to treat it as inspirational and
poetic symbolism, however. Try listening to these passages
with the ears of the Israelites of 700 years before Christ.
The people are huddled within the fenced cities of Judah,
quailing before the attacks of the mighty Sennacherib. Their
resources are few, their army is small, and they are surrounded
by enemies and waterless desert. But they are a people with
a Covenant. God has made a promise to them. It cannot
be fulfilled just now, but surely the time will come
?
Then suddenly a stocky, rugged looking, glowing-faced
man springs to his feet in the midst of the discouraged
Israelites, and gives them the Word of the Lord in their
doubt; "Remember ye not the former things, neither consider
the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing; now it
shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way
in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert." (43:18, 19)
"Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of
the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap
as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in
the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the
desert. And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the
thirsty land springs of water." (35:5, 6, 7). A prince of peace
will come: "And he shall judge among the nations, and
shall rebuke many people: nation shall not lift up sword
against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."(2:4)
And God himself will reign over His Kingdom: "The sun shall
be no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall
the moon give light unto thee: but the Lord shall be unto
thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory. Thy sun
shall no more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw
itself: for the Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the days
of thy mourning shall be ended."(60:19, 20). I have taken
some liberties with historical chronology here, but the point
is that for the listening Israelites this vision was so real
that they could almost reach out and touch it. Many of
them hoped to live to see it come to pass, for "I the Lord
will hasten it in his time" was the word Isaiah gave them.
Originally the Israelites thought of this new earth
as for themselves only, but their conception expanded over
time, with the help of the prophets, until they thought
of themselves as helping God to bring about the Kingdom
for all people. The Chosen People were chosen, not for
special blessings, but to help save the world. They never
expected the Kingdom to come about automatically. It was a part
of the Covenant that they must create the conditions for
the coming of the Kingdom by their righteousness and
piety. They knew that they could help to create these
conditions by living as if the Kingdom were already here, but they
never confused the "as if" with the fact. They knew there was
much to be done before the Kingdom could come for all
people, and there was no stopping-place short of a Kingdom for all.
For the Jew 2500 years ago, then, the Kingdom of
God was a good deal more than a warm feeling inside. It was
a good deal more than that for the men and women
who listened to Jesus 500 years later, and for the early
church community. Jesus said repeatedly that the Kingdom was
at hand, that it was very near. On several occasions he
was even more specific than that: "Truly, I say to you, there
are some standing here who will not taste death before they
see the Son of man coming in his Kingdom."(Matt. 16:28).
In spite of the fact that the Gospels were written some
time after Jesus' death, the feelings of excitement and
expectancy which he had aroused and the readiness to make
radical changes in way of life in order to enter into the
Kingdom, break out all through the Gospels and the Epistles. In
Paul's time the churches were in a regular ferment of
excitement about the coming of the Kingdom, and Paul sometimes
had to wield a firm hand to prevent this from degenerating
into wild and excessive enthusiasm.
I am not advocating that we should all go out and
join the Jehovah's Witnesses! But what has happened to
that sense of expectancy which all Christians once had? When
it comes to that, what are we expecting? Perhaps not
very much, because the more we have become aware of
the limitations of men the less we have expected of them,
and God as an active agent is pretty well out of the picture
in this humanistic age. Let us each one take a good look at
our own expectations our own vision of the Kingdom of
God. What sort of condition is the vision in? Is it good enough?
Is it clear enough? We pride ourselves as a Society on
our practical work for the Kingdom. Others may talk, but
we are doing! And indeed, it is right that we should be
doing. Many Friends are at this moment about their
Father's business in many parts of the world, and have little time
to spare for sitting down and listening to lectures about
it. But suppose someone should stop one of us tomorrow
as we are going about our tasks, and say, "I hear you
are working for the Kingdom of God. What is this Kingdom
like? I want to know, because I might like to work for it too. I
am not very satisfied with things as they are." Very probably
we should answer, "I'm so sorry, but I am already late for
a committee meeting. Ask me some other time, won't
you?" And we would know in our hearts that we could not give
an adequate answer. We are so immersed in
"next-stepism" that we have no time to look at the vision on the far horizon.
But it is not the blueprinters and social planners
who have had the greatest impact on history! Who knows
the men who drew up plans for abolishing discrimination in
the distant provinces of the Roman Empire? And who does
not know Jesus, the man who turned the Roman Empire
upside down by simply ignoring it, and proclaiming and living
a way of life so different from anything men then knew that
it seemed utterly absurd? Other men through the ages
have managed to ignore the rules of orderly social change
and break right through to the Kingdom. John Woolman
took that leap into the future, and lived as if the Kingdom
were already here. He could not have done so if he had not had
a clear vision of that Kingdom. By his life, he brought it
a little closer to the rest of the world than it had ever
been before. The Bruderhof is doing the same today. Most of
the rest of us have let our plans obscure our
visions. Instead of entering eagerly into the joy that is set before us, we
are dispiritedly turning all our tomorrows into yesterdays
before we ever reach them. We do this because we dare not lift
our eyes to the vision of that which is totally different from
the life we know. A change here, an alteration there that
we can work for and gladly. A patchwork job of salvation
is good enough for us. If there are to be radical changes,
time enough for that in the Hereafter. After all, the Kingdom
of God was probably never meant for earth anyway. If it
was, why is it so often referred to as the Kingdom of
Heaven? Most Christians do not realize that this is our
semantic heritage from the Jews, who were reluctant to use
directly the name of God. One means of avoiding this was to refer
to His Dwelling Place instead, but they never supposed
that He would permanently confine His Kingdom to heaven.
We however find it easier and more comfortable to keep it
at this safe distance.
But we cannot all be saints! At least, we don't think
we can. The saints, you know, never suspected that they
were saints. But it is true that gifts and strengths differ, and it
is not given to many to act with such power that the
spiritual center of gravity of the world shifts at their touch
alone. But the Kingdom will never come if we don't grow
towards it; at least it seems highly unlikely that God will
simply introduce it by a tour de force, although there are
those who believe this. At the present time man's eyesight is
so poor that he seems more likely to grow towards hell
than heaven. Let us look to our vision, that we may direct
our growth.
For most of us, the great enemy of the Kingdom is
Today. The trap of dailiness catches us, and makes cowards of
us all. For the train leaves for the office in five minutes; if
the beds aren't made and the dishes washed now the house
will be a mess all day. The baby is crying for his bottle,
nobody can find any clean underwear this morning, and the
editor of the Meeting's Monthly Bulletin must have
information about all the committee meetings to take place next
month within an hour. It is not only that these things can't
wait today, it is that the same things recur with the
same immediate urgency day after day after day. It is not as if
we could work up an extra burst of speed, finish our tasks
for once and all, and then be free to do "God's work." The
more we long to be doing other work, the more overwhelming
the tasks of the present seem, until they sap our courage
and our strength. Or we may respond to the pressure by
a complete about-face, and come to feel that these tasks
are after all the only ones that matter. Then we are in danger
of finding all our security in our daily routine, and will
fear anything that might change it.
Should we leave our daily tasks then? Should we
leave the plow standing in the middle of the furrow to follow
Him? There are some people whose special gifts require them
to do just this, and no man should hinder them. But God
does not call most of us away from the plow; he would
rather have us shift bosses, since it is after all His acre, and
start plowing the field for Him. St. Francis heard a voice
before the crucifix at St. Demian's saying, "Francis, go, repair
my house that thou seest is all in ruins" and he walked out
of the shop where he had been selling cloth for his
father, never to return. Brother Lawrence saw a vision of
God's Providence in a tree stripped of its leaves in winter,
and stayed all his life in a monastery kitchen washing dishes
in the presence of God. Each man, through the strength
of his vision, was living as if the Kingdom were already
here. Some men must change their work, like St. Francis;
others must do for God's sake what they formerly did for their
own, like Brother Lawrence. Many of us will find that we are
called to one kind of service at one time of life, and another at
a later time. Washing diapers and feeding young
children commands by far the largest share of my life right now,
but I know it will not always be so. For those of us who know that it is right for us to
stay where we are is it possible to avoid the trap of
dailiness? Can we transform our homes and offices into
advance outposts of the Kingdom? In the moments of exaltation
that come to us all, certainly. But day after day? You may
say, "But that is expecting too much! These are very fine
words, and we have used them ourselves occasionally,
especially on Sunday morning in Meeting for Worship, but we
can't really do this!" Friends, I have shared this reaction
with you. But I have been having some "close, plain work"
with myself in recent weeks on just this subject. I have
gradually come to realize that I have been expecting far too little
of myself. With the coming of the fifth baby, the
usual sicknesses in the other children and a major operation
for one of them, all in one month, I have been getting more
and more adept at making excuses for myself. I am too tired
to be patient, too tired to pray, too tired to make our home
"a place of friendliness, refreshment and peace, where
God becomes more real to all who dwell there and to those
who visit it." And all the time that I have been telling myself
this, I have been turning my back on the one Source
of refreshment that I needed! If we keep our backs turned
to God, His Kingdom gets to seem more and more unreal
and impossible, and we come to expect less and less of
ourselves in the way of service.
I trust that I will never again be able to persuade
myself that I am too tired to pray. For this, this is the one
thing needful. We like to think of prayer as a free overflowing
of the spirit, but there are times when it must be
undertaken as an act of the will, a discipline in the strictest sense of
the word. Religious temperaments differ, and I am not one
of those who place great reliance on specific procedures
and "steps" in the religious life. But turning to God in prayer
is the one indispensable step. Only through prayer can
our vision of His Kingdom come clear. The clearer it comes
the greater the strength, the greater the joy, the greater
the spiritual release which will enable us to live here and
now in such a way that the Kingdom can come to all mankind.
If there are things inside us that block our sight so that
we cannot look upon the joy that God has set before us, it
is through prayer that we can examine and gradually
dissolve these obstacles, for God is the First and Last
Counselor. Earthly counselors have their important place too, but it
is my experience that insights from the psychiatrist's
couch still have to be offered up to God in prayer before the
real liberation of the imprisoned spirit can take place. In spite
of all that can be said about the "God above God" and
the ultimate impersonality of the universe, it is the God of
the divine encounter, the personal God we meet in prayer,
who touches, transforms and liberates us. It is in Him that
we must put our trust.
But we must also trust ourselves. In a world
that specializes in props and supports, both
physical, psychological and spiritual, and devices to make life
easier, let us not be fooled into expecting too little of ourselves.
If we keep our eyes turned toward the Kingdom, we will
know that all things are possible in God's Sight. Paradoxically,
we must not expect too much, either. For even though we
are faithful in prayer, there are periods of spiritual dryness
which come to us all, periods when the inward obstacles loom
very large indeed, and the Kingdom seems to recede.
Madame Guyon experienced seven years of such dryness, when
God seemed to with-draw His presence from her entirely.
"But taught by the great inward Teacher, she was enabled
to perceive from the first, that it would not be safe for her
to estimate either the reality or the degree of her religion
by the amount of her happiness
She did not seek joy,
but God. God first, and what God sees fit to give, afterwards."
We must not depend on joy, then. It is set before us,
as a fruit of the spirit, but we must first seek the
Kingdom. When we are spiritually liberated to live as if the
Kingdom were already here, as we surely will be if we are faithful
in prayer and seeking, it will slowly move in upon us from
the horizon. Our brothers who now stand frozen before the
abyss will look up, and see the Kingdom coming and they
will start to build a bridge across the abyss in joy.
While yet we see with eyes, must we be blind?
Is lonely mortal death the only gate
To holy life eternal must we wait
Until the dark portcullis clangs behind
Our hesitating steps, before we find
Abiding good? Ah, no, not that our fate;
Our time-bound cry "too early" or "too late"
Can have no meaning in the Eternal Mind.
The door is open, and the Kingdom here
Yet Death indeed upon the threshold stands
To bar our way unless into his hands
We give our self, our will, our heart, our fear.
And then strange resurrection! from above
Is poured upon us life, will, heart, and love.
(XXVI From The Naylor Sonnets by Kenneth Boulding)